This study was performed by Josh Carter back in 2019 and we uploaded a preprint to bioRxiv and submitted the manuscript for review. Unfortunately the reviews came back just as the UK was going into lockdown in March 2020 and my memory was that the manuscript was rejected. The editor, however, had asked for major […]
Category: publication
In this preprint, Viki Brunner shows how, using the large CRyPTIC dataset, she can recapitulate the result that susceptible M. tuberculosis samples grow faster than samples that are resistant to rifampicin (and do not have any mutation that could compensate for that effect). Using the Fisher’s exact test, she is able to confidently identify 51 […]
A new paper with Lindsay Sonnenkalb as first-author has just been published in The Lancet Microbe. It is a collaboration between a number of groups, led by Stefan Niemann and in it we evolved resistance to bedaquiline in vitro. Sequencing revealed 265 genetic variants with 250 affecting Rv0678, which is the transcription regulator of mmpL5, […]
Fluoroquinolones are used to treat both normal and drug resistant tuberculosis and therefore being able to work out if an infection is resistant or not to fluoroquinolones is very important. Sequencing the genome of an infection is increasingly used to rapidly return which antibiotics could be used to treat a patient with tuberculosis. Genetics-based approaches […]
Yesterday eLife published the first paper from our citizen science project, BashTheBug, which was launched in April 2017 on the Zooniverse platform. (Update on 19 July 2022: the final formatted version of the paper has been posted on eLife). Through BashTheBug we asked for volunteers to classify images of M. tuberculosis growing on a range […]

In this preprint, which Alice has been working on for several years, we show how alchemical free energy methods can predict whether an amino acid mutation confers resistance to an antitubercular, but only in cases where the change in binding free energy is large. This is mainly because the confidence limits on the change in […]